UPDATE5: (Saturday 10/16/10) It has been a week, and I think this piece has been well distributed, so I’m putting it in regular queue now and it will gradually scroll off the page.
UPDATE4: (Friday 10/15/10) APS member Roger Cohen comments here on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth op/ed.
UPDATE3: (Friday 10/15/10) Andrew Revkin, after a week (I sent him this story last Friday) of digging around to get just the right rebuttal, responds here at Dot Earth.
UPDATE2: (Wednesday 10/13/10) This just in…click for the story.
APS responds! – Deconstructing the APS response to Dr. Hal Lewis resignation
UPDATE: (Saturday 10/9/10) Since this came in late Friday, many of our weekday WUWT readers might not see this important story, so I’m sticking it to the top for a couple of days. New stories will appear just below this one, please scroll down to see them. – Anthony
(Originally posted on 10/8/10 ) We’ve previously covered the APS here, when I wrote:
While Copenhagen and its excesses rage, a quiet revolution is starting.
Indeed, not so quiet now. It looks like it is getting ugly inside with the public airing of the resignation of a very prominent member who writes:
I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.- Hal Lewis
Below is his resignation letter made public today, via the GWPF.
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
What I would really like to see though, is this public resignation letter given the same editorial space as Michael Mann in today’s Washington Post.
Readers, we can do this. Here’s the place at WaPo to ask for it. For anyone writing to the WaPo, the national@washpost.com, is the national news editorial desk. The Post’s Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, is the readers’ representative within the newspaper. E-mail him at ombudsman@washpost.com or call 202-334-7582.
Spread the word on other blogs. Let’s see if they have enough integrity to provide a counterpoint. – Anthony
======================================
Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
==========================================================
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
The members are not even consulted. The blatherings of the executive admin types is taken as the opinion of the whole group, and it is no such thing.
So if global warming is some huge fraud, why are the polar ice caps, which have been around for hundreds of years melting? Don’t talk to me about hockey stick graphs and email consipracies. Why are they melting? I heard it’s 3 years in a row now that the shipping route through the North of Canada has been passable. Think they will have iced back over in a few years?
WE ARE ALL RENEGADES NOW!
SEIZE THE TIME!
Extend the struggle against the Carbon Con everywhere.
Beware of new ‘Hockey-Sticks’!
Harold Lewis,
THANK YOU! WELL DONE! YOUR STATEMENT IS BRILLIANT.
ClimateRealists and honest scientists everywhere should circulate and applaud what you have done. You will now doubtless be vilified and we must all defend you and NOW seize the time to advance what you have said!
Hundreds of battles like you have fought are being fought against the imposition of stupid & costly ‘Green/Climate Change’ policies, projects, taxes and brainwashing in many and various community, workplace, professional and scientific operations around the world. These battles in bodies and professions range from Town Planning and Banking to Schools and residents groups; and in professional organisations and University departments from Physics and Chemistry to all forms of Engineering and Science. They don’t get reported much but your upstanding will give them support and renewed encouragement. We should report on and assist the side of integrity in these struggles.
We must now SEIZE THE TIME until the cancer of CO2 Climate Fraud is lanced forever!
The CO2 scam and all policies which follow from it must be scrapped.
It may be that some in the Global Warming gravy train can see the game is up which could be why Professor of Climate Change Mike Hulme was so weak in his defence of the ideology of his own provenance when speaking in Cambridge on Oct 8th – see
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6435 or http://bit.ly/9NKupp
HOWEVER, the corrupt, dishonest and malevolent gravy train of the Carbon Con and Climate Change fraud will not be laughed away. It is now fighting a desperate rearguard action and we must beware because cornered rats are very vicious.
Their 5th and probably final apology and whitewash of climate fraud – by The UK Royal Society – has stalled {please see VIDEO http://bit.ly/9HueD5 } so now they are moving into a Custer’s last stand.
“Daddy, Did they use real children?”
The failed eco-fascist 10/10 SplatGate film {See VIDEO COMMENT http://bit.ly/ddA7Xv and discussion http://bit.ly/cOif35 } is but one example of their renewed viciousness. If any doubt the disgusting evil nature of this film I know of one example of an 8 year old asking his father “Daddy, Did they use real children?”
It is also clear the GW lobby won’t get far with total fraud games like ‘Ocean acidification’ and so are busy making up many new hockey sticks – mostly along the well-trodden fraudsters path of “It’s not a dog so it must be a cat!” centred around the highest most ‘respectable” institutions of academia and propaganda of our time.
The recent “new discoveries” of the well known facts about Solar activity and temperature presented in a shamefully deceitful manner** through studies emanating from Imperial College and reported by the Journal Nature and given totally one-sided coverage by the BBC are the shape of many more such things to come. Please see http://bit.ly/b1Bjge
Alongside this we have calls by the likes of pseudo-academic cancers such as The Grantham Institute of Climate Change to exclude Climate Realists (‘Sceptics’, ie evidence-based scientists) from the Royal Society. This is reminiscent of the treatment of science and scientists by Hitler and Stalin and should NOT be taken lightly. See COMMENTS under Pallab Ghosh BBC Report
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6383
Next we have the BBC’s minister of propaganda, Roger Harrabin, recent abseiling down holes in China to reveal ‘something unique about stalagmites’ in the last 50 or whatever years ‘which must be down to…. (oh please)’; but I suggest, more likelydown to the holding of a Climate Change summit in China this week.
{Of course, dear BBC and compliant beggars for research largesse, don’t consider:
Fact 1 Rivers being moved around by the regime running China in the last 50 years.
Fact 2 Various solar-lunar modulation patterns of Pacific and world circulation on time-scales of many decades and centuries**
Fact 3 Every period of 50 years or so has been unique and man was there for a lot of them but it doesn’t mean ‘Man’s CO2 done it’!…..etc etc etc}
In this struggle I am constantly amazed at every turn by the brazenness and depth of the sacrifice of evidence-based science at the alter of self-serving corruption of due, honest and fair democratic process.
I am even more staggered by the cretinous arrogance of the scientists and pseudo-scientists involved who appear to believe that their half-baked incomplete models of natural processes are more reliable than nature itself!
Never in the history of the world was so much arrogant falsity created by so few in order to deceive, control and exploit so many.
Support for Prof Harold Lewis and the state of the fight against the Carbon Con will be taken up at the CLIMATE FOOLS DAY EVENT in Parliament Weds Oct 27th 2pm – Please see http://bit.ly/d2NABV
Thanks, Piers
astrophysicist and long-range weather & climate forecaster of http://www.WeatherAction.com
** For further Comment on Sun-Earth work of IC Joanna Haigh see http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6428
For WeatherAction FORECASTS please visit –
http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact8&fsize=0
or foot of page http://bit.ly/9NKupp .
For Causes of Climate Change see red bold items in comments on Climate Realist thread “World Cooling has… ” -http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3307&linkbox=true&position=5
and for Solar-lunar jet stream shift prediction (which is what the changes in China are all about) see http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6165
M-F says:
October 9, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Oh dear. Where to start?
Piers Corbyn says:
October 9, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Good to see you here Sir! You mention the gravy train: Maybe that’s why Pachauri got the job. Him being a railroad engineer and all that…
Brian H says:
October 9, 2010 at 9:52 pm
dbleader61;
Good post. But I twitched every time I had to read “incontravertible”. Since the actual word is “incontrovertible”.
Remember Brian – to err is humane…
M-F says:
October 9, 2010 at 11:25 pm
So if global warming is some huge fraud, why are the polar ice caps, which have been around for hundreds of years melting? Don’t talk to me about hockey stick graphs and email consipracies. Why are they melting? I heard it’s 3 years in a row now that the shipping route through the North of Canada has been passable. Think they will have iced back over in a few years?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It already has iced over…. the multilayer, multiyear ice is expanding.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
—
Interesting. Worshipful warmist comments on *The Washington Post* Website bearing Dr. Mann’s “please, PLEASE don’t let the government prosecutors send me to federal prison as soon as the National Socialists lose control of the House of Representatives!” whimpers continue, all about as blessedly free of the ravages of intelligence as you’d expect.
Turns out that lots of folks had followed the link thereunto and reproduced, in whole and in part, Dr. Lewis’ letter of resignation from the American Physical Society in earlier comments, following those posts with robust and spirited defenses against the usual feeble “he’s not a climatologist, and not qualified to have an opinion!” irrelevancies.
The AGW True Believers (and I use the term in the Eric Hoffer sense) have made great noise over the past several decades about how we should “trust the experts” and the “qualifications” of their Hockey Team fraudsters, and now that more union-card-carrying and unimpeachably impartial academicians with irreproachable curricula vitae have had time enough to examine not only the raw contents of the FOIA2009.zip archive but also the considered analyses of men like Mr. Montford, the “authority” argument has gone against the “man-made climate change” campaign with a vengeance.
Has anybody yet tracked the response made by Dr. Callan to Dr. Lewis’ letter of resignation? Has Dr. Callan made any response?
—
I have submitted the professor’s resignation story to the Drudge Report. I hope Matt D’s people run with it.
I’m rather curious about some things brought up in the thread.
What qualifies and defines a scientist as a Climate Scientist?
How many Climate Scientists are there exactly?
I think that 100% of Climate Scientists should be in favor of climate change research. Are there really 3% of those who don’t agree?
How did we find out that those 97% agreed? Were unsolicited emails sent to them all asking their opinions?
Since when is it considered a “no no” to send an unsolicited e-mail regarding official business to a colleague within the same organization?
Does anyone else think it absurd that the APS would NOT want to open a scientific discussion group, given that the requirements to initiate same were clearly met per the APS’s constitution?
To past or current APS members here; are any of you Fellows of the APS?
Do any of the scientists here have the scientific and academic stature of Prof. Lewis?
Why would I not want to believe Prof. Lewis over, say, some newly-minted PhD?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I have just done a search on Google News for: “Hal Lewis APS resignation” without the quotes and the results so far speak for itself. Sad!
Google News search results
http://tinyurl.com/2uy4525
John Coleman rightly points out that the only scientists who can really afford to dissent openly on these matters are the retired ones, or those outside the academic grant-manger system. In some very rare cases, like Lindzen’s, they manage to do it while still in the system if their credentials and tenure are solid enough, though they pay a big price. For younger ones, it means instant career suicide.
This is a very depressing state of affairs. An army of bureaucrats having, with one hand, a firm grip on the checkbook, while with the other hand they hold an entire generation of scientists and researchers firmly by the balls. It is no wonder that, in this kind of situation, those who are being so shamefully held attempt by all means to convince themselves of the truth of these dogmas, to ease the shame. For most of them, it would be impossible to function otherwise.
You could say that the Red Button in that infamous video represents not a fantasy, but a crude reminder of a well established reality: show the least sign of a doubt, and we will detonate your career.
richard verney says (October 8, 2010 at 3:44 pm) says
“This raises the age old dilemna as to whether one is better to fight battles from within or to stand proud but on the sidelines.”
Lewis is an Emeritus Professor, so presumably outside the pitiful AGW tent pissing in. That’s good. Real good.
M-F wrote:
“So if global warming is some huge fraud, why are the polar ice caps, which have been around for hundreds of years melting?”
Hundreds of years? Yup, the arctic cap was small hundreds of years ago, and the northwest passage has been navigable before.
All you need to do is figure out why those occasions didn’t cause a panic, and why when carbon dioxide was much lower hundreds of years ago, the ice caps were smaller.
harry says (October 10, 2010 at 4:35 am)
“the arctic cap was small hundreds of years ago”
Indeed, “Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time.”
http://www.iceagenow.com/High_CO2_levels_bring_prosperity_and_longer_life.htm
Jimbo says:
October 10, 2010 at 3:37 am
I have just done a search on Google News for: “Hal Lewis APS resignation” without the quotes and the results so far speak for itself. Sad!
Google News search results
http://tinyurl.com/2uy4525
=================
The News and the Blogs become completely separate universes when stories of this kind appear.
This is a search in the blogs. It’s all over the place. The blogs seem to be the only thing remotely ressembling a democratic press these days.
http://tinyurl.com/22nr6e7
Francisco says:
October 10, 2010 at 3:44 am [ … ]
Excellent post! Kudos.
Samoth: Hal Lewis was an APS Fellow, not just an ordinary member. The APS selects only 0.5% of its members per year for that honor.
Furthermore, he was trained by Oppenheimer, studied at UC Berkeley and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, and chaired the elite JASON group of scientists who did semi-secret consulting for the US government.
Your notion that Lewis was just some nobody crank out of thousands of APS members is simply incorrect.
So that’s 47,946 members of the APS who have not resigned, then. Really, if Lewis has hard evidence of fraud he should present it, otherwise he should shut up. I for one, am getting a little fed up with this serious charge being thrown about with a conspicuous lack of supporting evidence.
Professor Emeritus Lewis is annoyed that the APS did not amend their position statement on climate change after ‘Climategate’, which he described as ‘fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity.’
However in his resignation letter, the professor provides no evidence to support his charge of fraud, which is of course an extremely grave one. If he has such evidence one has to wonder why he did not make a submission either to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee or the Muir Russell panel, both of which actively solicited such evidence from any interested parties.
The background is that Lewis and a handful of other senior physicists have been attempting to get the APS to endorse their viewpoint of corrupted science for some time, but their views have not gained any significant traction within the APS membership. He signed an open letter to Congress in mid-2009 stating that ‘the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help.’ http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3666
In late 2009 they circulated a letter to a selection of members stating that ‘By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership.’ The signatories were …
Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil
About the same time Lewis and others organised a petition of APS members to pursuade the Society to amend its position on climate change. He gained signatures from 160 members, or about one third of one percent of the membership. Maybe he has decided that his (tiny) minority position has become untenable?
REPLY: Phil, did you sign on to support 10:10?
…when 97% of climate scientists support the research on climate change. Are 97% of climate scientists on an elaborate conspiracy?
desmong: Specifically, 97% of “climatologists who are active publishers on climate change” agree that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” http://tinyurl.com/dehjun
It’s hardly surprising that almost all climatologists publishing on climate change believe in human contributions to climate change.
Furthermore, believing that humans provide a significant contribution to changing global temperatures is not that big a deal either. Heck, I agree and I wouldn’t be surprised if 75% or more of the participants on this blog agree.
Also, these publishing climatologists aren’t a conspiracy. They are part of a $2 billion/year climate research industry. They are a self-selected group who know where the bread is buttered. Most of their jobs didn’t exist until the climate change boom.
If anyone knows how to contact Mr. Lewis, please encourage him to send his letter to newspapers across the nation, under his own signature, with an intro as to who he is and why his opinion matters. Newspapers will not just up and publish this unless it is submitted in this way, in my opinion. Michael Mann wrote a letter and then sent it. Please follow suit, Mr. Lewis.
…when 97% of climate scientists support the research on climate change. Are 97% of climate scientists on an elaborate conspiracy?
desmong: Specifically, 97% of “climatologists who are active publishers on climate change” agree that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” http://tinyurl.com/dehjun
It’s hardly surprising that almost all climatologists publishing on climate change believe in human contributions to climate change.
Furthermore, believing that humans provide a significant contribution to changing global temperatures is not that big a deal either. FWIW I agree and I wouldn’t be surprised if 75% or more of the participants on this blog agree.
Also, these publishing climatologists aren’t a conspiracy. They are part of a $2 billion/year climate research industry. They are a self-selected group who know where their bread is buttered. Most of their jobs didn’t exist until the climate change boom.
One good thing has come from this scam, we now know just who can be bought, either with tax payers money or phoney rhetoric, Hal Lewis is indeed a great man, while it is true the decision to stand on his ethics was a little less painfull than younger scientists it takes nothing from him, it must have taken some deep soul searching to do the right thing, as for the simpletons who talk glibly about the melting ice caps and the open north west passage, I suggest the try some actual research outside the user edited wikpedia then admit their haste and gullibility (there are 100 year old scientific observations about water temps and ice extent, then how did the Nazi raider get through the NW passage in 39, not many Russian atomic powered ice breakers then were there?) from my printed history books when I was a teen I read about the Vikings being frozen out of farms on Greenland (where did that name come from) I read about the ice fairs on the Thames in London there is an etching showing one with a huge fire on the ice. All this is in print no digital cleansing can be applied, that is why opressive dictators used to burn books that opposed them, that is why both the EU and the present tyrant in the Whitehouse want to control the internet, and why the islamic countries banned Blackberries.
I trained as an engineer (electro-mechanical mainly) but somehow landed up owning a garage, I do understand basic physics and understand that no one actually knows much about cycles and other effects on ice extent in the poles, our accurate readings of extent and thickness are limited to a blink of the eye compared to their age but the pseudo experts claim death spirals. It will take a lot more of us to follow Hal’s lead and stand up to be counted before this scam is put to bed, however we now know who we can trust scientifically and politically, that’s a first.
When Hal Lewis speaks of the ‘money flood’, we ought to understand that there is only one way of flushing the foxes out of their holes. With money. Offer every member of the APS the equivalent of 5 years tax funded grants in hard cash and there just might be a more honest appraisal of the so called ‘incontravertible’ truth of global warming. Without this sort of incentive, there will never be, short of being brought to shame or criminal proceedings, any likelihood of those scientists abandoning the lovely gravy train they’re on.
Phil Clarke says:
October 10, 2010 at 5:57 am
About the same time Lewis and others organised a petition of APS members to pursuade the Society to amend its position on climate change. He gained signatures from 160 members, or about one third of one percent of the membership. Maybe he has decided that his (tiny) minority position has become untenable?
Come on, get real. It was 200+ members, not 160. Have you read the resignation letter?
“4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.”
Then go on reading the APS Constitution please.
“ARTICLE VIII – DIVISIONS, TOPICAL GROUPS, AND FORUMS
1. Organization. – If at least two hundred members wish to advance and diffuse the knowledge of a specific subject or subfield of physics, they may petition the Council to establish a Topical Group. The Council shall distribute to the Chairperson and the Secretary-Treasurer of each existing Division and Topical Group a statement of the areas of interest of the proposed Topical Group for review and comment. Following Council approval, the new Topical Group shall be officially initiated and considered active when at least 200 members have enrolled. [etc., etc.]“
The petition was handed to Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society, but he failed to perform his duties as described by the Constitution, that is, seeking Council approval, instead he has declined to accept it and initiated a poll among members on who would sign an as yet non-existent counter-petition instead.
That’s a clearcut violation of Constitutional procedures. As soon as an Institution fails to follow its own Constitution, that Institution is doomed. It is as simple as that.
Phil Clarke says:
“So that’s 47,946 members of the APS who have not resigned, then.”
Since Phil implies that he knows the number of members who have resigned from the APS due to their global warming stance, why doesn’t he just tell us the number?
People join and leave organizations all the time. Thousands of new graduates become members every year, while others pass away or retire. Only a fool would claim that Hal Lewis is the only honorable physicist in the APS. My bet is that the total number who have resigned since the APS insiders drank the Kool Aid following Climategate is in the thousands. Only a few pals in the APS are privy to the real information. And who would ever trust anything claimed by the devious people running the APS?
[Well, I guess there’s Phil Clarke. Oh, and Joel Shore… Yoo-hoo, Jo-o-o-o-el!
Where a-a-a-re you-u-u-u??☺]
We get the same unacceptable answers from the backscratching insiders controlling the APS membership list that we get from people like Michael Mann, who refuses to disclose his methodologies: “Trust us.”
There is only ONE reason that the APS refuses to allow any but a few insiders access to its membership list: they intend to control the propaganda they emit, and different views will not be tolerated.
Clarke continues:
“About the same time Lewis and others organised a petition of APS members to pursuade the Society to amend its position on climate change. He gained signatures from 160 members, or about one third of one percent of the membership.”
Apparently Clarke didn’t even read the Lewis resignation letter. It was very difficult rounding up enough email addresses to get those signatures. No doubt many of them were already in Dr Lewis’s possession. To imply, as Clarke has, that Dr Lewis asked 48,946 members for support, and received the signatures of only “one third of one percent of the membership” is simply mendacious.
The fabricated numbers thrown around by the climate alarmist crowd are reminiscent of the old Supreme Soviet Politburo votes for one candidate — which generated only about ‘one third of one percent’ more votes than Mr Clarke’s numbers.
Maybe Phil Clarke could try to defend the APS policy of refusing to allow the means for its dues-paying members to contact one another, and defend the arbitrary decision by the APS pals to abide by their own written policy.
And we’re still waiting for an answer from Phil — did he sign up with 10:10?
Enquiring minds, etc.
DirkH says:
October 9, 2010 at 4:38 pm
“Daniel Kozub says:
October 9, 2010 at 10:50 am
“[…]The earth emits radiation in a more-narrow spectrum, and that energy escapes the planet unless it is absorbed by other matter.[…]”
Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_law_of_thermal_radiation
which states that emission and absorption in heated objects are equal in local thermal equilibrium. So the matter that absorbs the radiation must also re-emit it.”
Yes, in a closed system, with a black body, at thermal equillibrium.
Your first error is inferring that all radiation emitted by the sun is absorbed by the earth.
Your second error is inferring that I was only including thermal radiation.
Neither the sun nor the earth are black-bodies. But that isn’t an error in logic.
And the earth is far from being a closed system. Please research terrestrial energy sources, gravitation, gas laws, radioactive decay, relativity, and heat of formation.
It’s sad that reading wikipedia can make you more ignorant.